Thermal activation in bistable systems under external periodic forces

Abstract

Considered is the motion of a Brownian particle in a bistable potential exposed to an external periodic field. Our analysis is based on a systematic Fokker-Planck description of the non-stationary stochastic process. Besides general characteristics, such as the nonmixing property, we present full numerical solutions for probability distributions and the modulation induced rate enhancement. Moreover, approximation schemes for small and large frequencies are considered and their results are compared to the numerical data.